Biz & IT —

Microsoft PowerShell rolled into Longhorn Server

Microsoft's PowerShell (aka msh and previously known as Monad) will indeed …

Microsoft's PowerShell (aka msh and previously known as Monad) will indeed ship as part of Longhorn server, which is currently in Beta 2. It is not clear yet if PowerShell will actually replace the venerable Windows Command Processor (cmd.exe), but including it at all is a good move. Most administrators and developers who work with Microsoft technology will be excited to see how flexible and powerful PowerShell is, permitting you to do what are currently tedious tasks with simple scripts.

Of course *nix folks will say they've been able to do a lot of this for years, but msh is more than just a bash replacement. It allows scripting of jobs like Active Directory administration and WMI queries along with things we are used to doing via wsh scripts. Some examples are below, courtesy of The PowerShell Guy's blog.

For the system admins out there without a programming background, this probably looks pretty intimidating at first, but I suspect that we'll grow to love it. Anything that keeps you from getting paged in the middle of a poker game is worth a little time invested. For the folks that already have a lot of wsh or other programming chops, this is just another reason to look forward to the next version of Windows Server. Microsoft has stated that their goal with Longhorn is to make it truly an enterprise class OS, and automation is a big part of that.